Re: builtin read stops at '\0'

[Greg Wooledge]

On Thu, May 19, 2011 at 03:23:55PM +0200, Rafaël Fourquet wrote:
> I have a program which outputs groups of filenames. Each group is separated
> by a newline, and within each group,
> each name is separated by '\0'.

That seems backwards somehow... the "stronger" delimiter (NUL) is used
in the inner group, and the "weaker" delimiter (newline) in the outer.
Oh well -- I assume you have no control over that.

Here's what I'd do: just use tr to swap the delimiters.

while read -d '' -r group; do
  mapfile -t files <<< "$group"
  ...
done < <(tr '\n\0' '\0\n' < "yourfile")

> I want to pipe each group to xargs -0.

Not what I'd do.